One of the largest tower owners and operators in North America, American Tower (News - Alert), recently acknowledged that 30 percent of its revenue came from the emerging markets outside of the U.S. As an independent owner, operator and developer of wireless and broadcast communications real estate, American Tower currently owns and operates thousands of communications sites in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Germany, Ghana, India, Mexico, Peru, South Africa and Uganda.
According to AMT (News - Alert) VP Benjamin Lowe, the success can be attributed to the company’s aggressive approach of expanding its colocation or shared infrastructure model into emerging markets in Latin America, Africa and India.
“If you look at it by operator, American Tower has been the most aggressive in terms of trying to take this colocation model, which again is the shared infrastructure business model, and extend that into markets that are less mature,” Lowe explained in a statement.
The current African, Asian and Latin American markets are characterized by the presence of single tenant towers. Again most of these towers are owned by the operators. This was exactly the picture of U.S. communication market 15 years back, Lowe pointed out. A few companies including AMT are bringing in international investment to set up towers with multiple platforms.
“If you look at AMT, over 30 percent of its business come from emerging markets in Latin America, Africa and India. For the last several years, they have been very aggressively redeploying cash flow into emerging markets. They are getting just over 30 percent of their revenue now from international markets,” Lowe said in a statement.
American Tower Corp recently deployed a Distributed Antenna System (DAS) network solution at the Daytona International Speedway in Daytona Beach, Florida to facilitate rising wireless communication and data activity throughout the 480-acre motorsports complex.
Edited by Rachel Ramsey